RoboCup

4-legged league

The "Jolly Pochie" team consists of faculty, staff, and students from the department of informatics at both Kyushu University and Tohoku University. Our research interests mainly include machine learning, machine discovery, data mining, image processing, string processing, software architecture, visualization, and related topics. Perhaps surprising is the fact that none of us had any background or experience with robotics before forming or joining the team. Many of us were inspired by RoboCup 2002 held in Fukuoka though - where our department is located - and hoped to find an interesting challenge while researching in new direction.

We’ve basically been constructing all the modules and tools on our own from scratch. You could certainly say this was for the purpose of higher education learning, but we also wanted to satisfy our newfound curiosity. We first started work on programming back in March of 2003, and we later challenged other teams at both the Japan Open and the World Competition in 2003. Unfortunately, we lost all out matches, and after the World Competition, we reorganized the program structure completely. We finally attained victory while participating at RoboCup 2004 and acquired a pre-qualification to RoboCup 2005. In 2005, we introduced the scripting language Lua into our repertoire of languages used and improved upon most of the program modules. As a result, we reached the quarterfinals of RoboCup 2005 and came away with good results based on technical challenges (official results).

What's RoboCup Soccer 4-legged Robot League?

RoboCup is an international competition using robots held every year. RoboCup Soccer 4-legged League is just one of the events of this competition. As the name of the league implies, the teams compete with each other via soccer matches in this league. However, the players are not human beings but rather autonomous, 4-legged robots. More specifically, it is stated that SONY/AIBO ERS-7 (or ERS-210) be used as players in the matches. Teams develop their programs that go into the robots such that the robots will play autonomously, that is to say, without any form of remote control. Victory and defeat are decided by goals scored, as in an ordinary soccer game, but what’s important to remember in this case is that a high score is the result of how intelligently and smoothly your robots play. In fact, you can even think of it as a match between the ideas and programming techniques of each team. Another important aspect of this league is that the players (i.e. the AIBO robots) are entertainers. They can excite the spectators when they perform well and show their spectacular skills.